Microsoft Office 365 First Impression

By combining a SharePoint Workspace, Outlook, Messaging, the new Web Apps, along with a public website, Microsoft Office 365 gives users access to the cloud, either in combination with Office on the desktop, or to work completely online. In this article, Tom Bunzel, author of Easy Microsoft Office 10, shows you how you can use Outlook to organize your Calendar and Contacts between your online and desktop presence, collaborate with a team by sharing documents, and use Lync messaging to communicate in real time. Bunzel also shows you how can use Web Apps to edit and present files online, and with a public website you can communicate with the outside world.

From the author of

From the author of

With Office 365, Microsoft goes confidently into the cloud, putting up a SharePoint workspace, an instant messaging capability, and online versions of the key components of its Office suite.

The SharePoint Workspace

When you log in to your Office 365 installation, you get a SharePoint location online which you can use to collaborate with a team of colleagues. Your online venue comprises of a number of components (see Figure
1).

Figure 1 Microsoft Office 365 starts you off with an administration page that gives you access to the various components.

Components in the Home view (Figure
1) include Outlook, Lync (instant messaging and conferencing), the Team site (SharePoint) for collaboration and shared documents, and the web applications, which are online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. More links are at the top, including Admin for adding users and configuring permissions for collaboration using the Team Site.